A piece of advice for others who want to create products:
Instead of beginning by deciding that you want to create a company, you should start with the issue that the world is trying to solve.
The best businesses are those that aim to bring about some sort of social change.
Even if it's only local in one location, it's preferable to starting out because you want to make a lot of money, have a large workforce, or develop your company in some way.
A piece of advice for others who want to create products:
Instead of beginning by deciding that you want to create a company, you should start with the issue that the world is trying to solve.
The best businesses are those that aim to bring about some sort of social change.
Even if it's only local in one location, it's preferable to starting out because you want to make a lot of money, have a large workforce, or develop your company in some way.
Silicon Valley has this perverse quality.
It feels backwards when people decide they want to start a business before they even know what they want to do.
Believing in what you're doing is one of the things that helps you get through that.
The best businesses are created by having the knowledge that what you're doing offers real value to others.
How to choose what to construct
The secret is creating a business that is committed to picking up knowledge as quickly as possible. Organizations are living, breathing organisms that can learn at different rates depending on the decisions you make.
In many ways, starting a business is similar to applying the scientific method.
You test a variety of hypotheses, and if the experiments are well-designed, you eventually sort of figure out what to do. and because of that, there are many different decisions that we make within the business. At any given time, we invest in this substantial testing framework, right down to truly empowering individual engineers.
There is more than one version of Facebook active worldwide.
There are probably tens of thousands of versions active because engineers here have the authority to test ideas and distribute them to perhaps 10,000 or 100,000 users before receiving feedback on their work.
Tens of thousands of different experiments being conducted while giving the people control
If we were to try all these different things, you can see how much further we would advance by learning about culture and advancing quickly in that direction.
Making important decisions that work
When you perform tasks well, you shouldn't need to take unnecessary risks. You want to actually change in a way where you collaborate with your neighborhood, take action, and learn.
Paying close attention to how users were utilizing the service
When everything is going smoothly, you use data and qualitative feedback you gather from observing how your community uses your product to identify the issues that need to be fixed before relying primarily on your intuition to come up with potential solutions. Then you put those hypotheses to the test by implementing them, gathering more information, and getting feedback; this helps you decide where to go.
It's your responsibility as CEO to avoid situations where you would need to take these absurd actions.
However, when things are going well, you're learning gradually and developing in that way. Of course, it's inevitable that you won't be ahead of everything over the course of doing things, so it's better to make big moves and be willing to do that than to have pride and refuse to do that and never admit that you could have done something better in the past.
What to look for when bringing people on board and how to hire your team
Invest in individuals you believe to be exceptionally talented even if they haven't done that particular thing before. This goes for recent graduates as well as the CFO who brought the company public but hasn't brought a company public before and whose prior experience was largely in production or development.
Concentrate on the truly talented, and evaluate a person's raw talent.
Frequently, you can tell who someone is by the things they have done. Everyone has done something right, of course. Even if you're 19, you've probably worked on interesting side projects. It's important to not assume that someone must have done the job they're applying for in order to be qualified for it.
Give the employees of the company many opportunities.
You will work on problem sets with a number of new employees who join your company. They all begin in various positions. They all developed from being engineers, data analysts, or product managers. The best employees remain engaged and want to work for your company because they believe they will receive opportunities like those because they see that you create them for them, which is what happens.
What the next 20 years will bring that will be exciting
We are concentrated on three major changes that we want to see in the world: connectivity, artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented reality.
Connectivity
Getting every person on the planet online. Currently, more than half of the world's population does not have access to the Internet, making it simply not universally available. Therefore, connecting everyone is crucial and will benefit people all over the world.
The following is AI
For the next ten years, that will be a huge deal because it will unleash so much potential in a wide range of fields, whether it be in the fight against diseases or incentivizing people to drive more safely.
The use of virtual reality and augmented reality will then make a significant difference.
That will only encourage creativity and the ability to empathize with others. Greater immersion is possible than we can even achieve with video.
If you're 19 years old today and want to make an impact on the world like Mark Zuckerberg has, follow his advice:
The most crucial thing for entrepreneurs to do is to choose a cause they are passionate about, work on it, and then wait until it is profitable before committing to turning it into a business. That's how a huge percentage of the best businesses that have ever been built were constructed. not from those who knew they wanted to launch a business before they even started.